Ray Allen

Professor, History; Director, American Studies Program

Ray Allen is professor of music at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition he directs the American Studies Program and serves as a senior associate at the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music. He teaches courses on American folk and popular music with an emphasis on the music cultures of New York City.

Allen's research focuses on a variety of American folk and popular music, ranging from African American gospel and Caribbean Carnival music to works of composers Ruth Crawford Seeger and George Gershwin, with a special interest in New York City music cultures. He is the author of books and articles on American, African American and Afro-Caribbean vernacular music styles, including Singing in the Spirit: African-American Sacred Quartets in New York City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), and is co-editor of Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Popular Music and Identity in New York (University of Illinois Press, 1998) and most recently Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth Century American Music(University of Rochester Press, 2007). He is currently completing a manuscript on the New Lost City Ramblers and the urban folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s.

Trained in folklore, ethnomusicology, and American Studies, Allen received a bachelor of science degree from Bucknell University and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. .